A hill-walking blog.. With added wine.

snowdonia

Hills: Moel Eilio (Hewitt), Foel Gron (Hewitt) Foel GochWhen: Saturday 7 February 2015Who: just meWeather: see for yourself!Ascent: about 720m in totalConditions underfoot: Snow and ice on ascent of Eilio: patchy snow on the other hills over about 550mTime: About 5 hours including breaks – but who cares.Post walk drink: Merlot

Having started this blog on 1 January this year, so far it has contained rather a lot of old walks, with me steadily posting up some old favourites or walks that have for whatever reason been memorable, whether due to stunning winter vistas, stinking hangovers or pouring rain and wind. What it hasn’t contained is any walks this year, for the simple reason that there haven’t been any. Living in a rather flat part of the country doesn’t help with the highest part of Kent apparently being in someone’s back garden! It was well past time to sort that out, and therefore a trip to Snowdonia with my walking group was planned. Rather to my surprise, the weather forecast was actually pretty good!

The first law of my walks: if the weather does not go wrong something else will. If it does not involve a hangover/ unintentional visit to the pub then it involves either a transport debacle or mechanical failure of some description, or a case of human error (e.g. forgetting or losing the map). The second seemed to be the case this time as I couldn’t find my map of Snowdonia, necessitating a panic buy of a replacement. I then found my original map in a drawer in my office and remembered I’d lent it to a colleague and never taken it home. So now I had two maps.. I also remembered that some time ago I had splashed out more money than I care to think about on a new GPS with OS mapping which we hadn’t been able to figure out. The evening before heading off was spent fiddling with the GPS and eventually realising I had put the memory chip with the OS maps in wrong – but still couldn’t get the map to display at the correct size. A phone call to the help desk being of zero use I eventually worked out all I had to do was zoom in and bingo, OS mapping at 1:50000 for the whole of the UK. Result! 🙂